Early last week, StatCounter Global Stats released a special analysis of Digg versus Reddit and reported that, comparatively, Digg traffic to the StatCounter network of 3 million websites plummeted on Monday (August 30) to 7.6 percent as opposed to Reddit’s 92.4 percent. Here’s a look at the interesting chart — check out the stats, particularly on and after August 25 when Digg v4 went live:

Much like the Bury and Upcoming Stories buttons on Digg, a whole lot of search interest has vanished.

Search interest in Digg has been waning, as far back as mid-2007. Search interest for [Reddit” on Google has overtaken that of [Digg” in the last 30 days. Regionally, from 2004 to present, Digg and Reddit are most popular in the U.S. and Canada, while Ireland tops the StumbleUpon charts:

Looking at the top related searches, it’s also interesting to note that social-bookmarking battle in the search engines is really between Digg and Reddit, as they appear prominently in each of their respective lists.

Also, audiences for these three social-marking sites do somewhat differ. People searching for [digg” are probably more likely to be looking for news, blog items, or videos; [reddit” searchers have a predilection to NSFW material, but are probably more tech-savvy (jailbait, programming); and people searching for [stumbleupon” seem to be more interested in browser plug-ins, toolbars, and downloads. (Also, check out this infographic for some more Digg vs. Reddit comparative data from July.)

Some may recall DiggBar, which generated interest in 2009 and upset a few SEOs. They seem to have weathered that storm, albeit search interest continued to decline. The bar has gone in favor of revamped browser extensions.

Chitika Research also reported that since Digg v4 launched, they saw less traffic to sites in their network coming from Digg, while traffic from Reddit has risen.

Perhaps the current hullabaloo will die down with time as outgoing CEO Kevin Rose said we should expect Digg v3 functionality with Digg v4 backend. However, the search trend to watch is this: will Digg manage to stem the momentum Reddit has at present?

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